The One Big Happy from March 3rd:
Ruthie doesn’t know which expressions are conventionalized (and have to be reproduced exactly) and which are fresh creations (possibly metaphorical, but made up on the spot) — whose parts can be varied by substitution.
While putting together a brief note on the death (late in February) of linguist Dick Oehrle, I got the news of the death this morning of Morris Halle (who was Dick’s dissertation director, and mine too).
(Dick was about 6 years younger than me, Morris about 17 years older.)
Passed around on Facebook:
The 1929 Magritte original, often riffed on, went Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’, a disavowal that sets up a contradiction between text and image. So here we have another Magrittean disavowal, as I’ve come to call the phenomenon; there’s a survey in my 8/19/17 posting “Magrittean disavowals”.
But they come in two species, and it’s not entirely clear which one the example above belongs to.
Yesterday was Sunday, and the morning name for the day was, appropriately, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (the movie, and the book on which it was based):
(#1)
(About a gay pornstar and his presentation in photographs. Not about language, also with talk about men’s bodies and mansex in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A fresh LucasFilm pornstar, in a recent ad:
(#1) Marlon’s top half; the image #1+2 in “Marketing Rico Marlon” on AZBlogX has the whole X-rated picture
Compare #1 with this p.r. photo:
(#2) A cropped version of #3 on AZBlogX
A bit of clever cartoon humor created by Michael Babich for the Google+ community UX/UI Design (and posted on Facebook):
A play on the icons used on computer platforms for various ways of displaying information, likening the shape of the icons to the shape of kinds of food (a hamburger, döner kebab on a vertical rotisserie, a bento box, a kebab on a stick, meatballs). And exploiting the ambiguity of the noun menu — in its older sense in a food context and in a metaphorical sense in computing.
One bit of language play (requiring some food knowledge) and one cartoon photograph (rather than drawing) on the Therapist cartoon meme, with the Easter Bunny folded in:
(#1) Poppin’ Fresh the Pillsbury Doughboy meets the Matzo Man
(#2) “I don’t know where the eggs come from, and I have no idea why I feel compelled to hide them.”
(About dance rather than language.)
After some time away from dancers, I returned earlier today with Israeli dancer Yoav Bosidan, and then Mike McKinley went on a run through several Ballet Boys, two of them projecting intense emotions through facial expressions: cheeky Alexander Fost and smouldering Ransom Wilkes-Davis (both Americans). He followed that up with the charming Emanuel Abruzzo (an Argentine dancer of presumably Italian, specifically Abruzzese, descent).
That would be today, simultaneously April Fool’s Day and Easter Sunday. Celebrations for both are in progress.
For April Fool’s Day, a TitanMen ad offers, unaccountably to my mind, sale prices on gay porn flicks like Dick Danger 2; on that flick, see my 3/9/18 posting “The further adventures of Dick Danger”; for the sale ad, see #1 in today’s AZBlogX posting “For Easter Fool’s Day”. (Could it be that the TitanMen 35%-off sale is a joke?)
Then some food pranks for the holiday, to add to those in my 4/1 14 posting “April 1”.
As for Easter, I’ve prepared a dinner table of mostly X-rated paschal images in my AZBlogX posting, sumarized below.
(Significant discussions of gay porn, men’s bodies, and mansex — definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)
In yesterday’s “Deviant Passover rites”, a section on gay Jewish guys partying at the Sederlicious event in NYC, including a note on non-Jews who appreciate Jewish men — called bagel chasers in write-ups of the event (my 12/19/15 posting “X queen” mentioned matzo(h) queen for a man with a preference for Jewish men, and also hummus queen or falafel queen for a man with a preference for Arab/Middle Eastern men).
So in the gay sexual marketplace, there are certainly outgroup customers for Jewish men (and for Muslim men), but there’s evidence that this is a minority taste (suggesting significant implicit prejudice): while gay porn featuring Jewish men isn’t unknown, there’s not a lot of it — certainly nothing like the enormous amount of porn featuring black and Latino men as objects of desire. Black and Latino men, especially working-class men, are seen as strongly masculine and powerful (and therefore attractive as fantasy lust-objects, in what you might think of as thug porn), while Jewish men in general are not.
With the (partial) exception of Israelis. The stereotype of Israeli men is that they’re soldiers, physically tough guys, while American Jews are stereotypically businessmen, accountants, lawyers, scholars, and so on. So there’s a vein of high-end gay porn featuring actors identified as Israelis (promoted especially by Michael Lucas) and a considerable genre of amateur porn offering men identified as Israelis, but not much featuring the sort of American guys who might turn up at Hebro events like Sederlicious.
Illustrations to come from Michael Lucas porn; Israeli gay icon Eliad Cohen; and an unusual piece of amateur (but well produced) gay porn starring a man identified as young Israeli dancer Yoav Bosidan (currently dancing with the Ballet am Rhein).